I Wanna Be Well

I Wanna Be Well is the first retrospective of the work of renowned American artist, activist, writer, and educator Gregg Bordowitz. The exhibition features Bordowitz’ seminal films and activist materials; rarely-seen sculptures and drawings; books, essays, and poetry; personal ephemera; and recent performance films. The title of the exhibition pays homage to the infamous punk band the Ramones, and to their 1977 album Rocket To Russia. Born in Brooklyn in 1964 and raised in Long Island, Queens, Bordowitz moved to Manhattan’s East Village when he was eighteen and came of age during America’s last great analog era. Over the last thirty years, Bordowitz has marshalled his prodigious intellect and artistic vision to analyze and confront oppression, shame, prejudice, and death—working across interrelated forms including film, essays, poetry, lectures, plays, and live performance. These investigations have allowed Bordowitz to assume different subject positions while addressing illness, existence, and love with profound intimacy and introspection. Bordowitz’ films, writings, and performances share a concern with pedagogies of healing and learning, while embracing doubt and vulnerability….

swallow

swallow is a multi-channel video installation of visual gestures from contemporary television and film exploring parts of black femme existence considered less desirable for consumption. what resistance sits wet and warm in the offal? swallow considers the different imperatives around consumption that exist for black bodies and what it feels like to hunger for things that catch in your throat. how do we read black femme queerness into, underneath and behind these visual spaces? how does it look, feel and sound, to open things up so that we can fit inside?

Join friends and artists in toasting the first night of TBA:18 at the festival’s Opening Night Dinner! Chefs Matt Howard, Jeremy Larter, and Timothy Wastell (Field Day Feasts and Gatherings) will cook a spectacular family-style meal that embodies the farm-to-table movement that has shaped Portland’s culinary landscape for the past decade. These talented chefs have created a plentiful menu, featuring Baharat-spiced free-range chicken with smoked Japanese eggplant, mild habañero, hen egg bottarga; and charred cauliflower with oil-poached ceci bean, mustard greens, roasted Interlaken grapes and sesame dukkah, plus much more. Immediately following dinner, head into our TBA late-night hub to dance the night away with The Beautiful Street….

16th Annual TBA Festival Opening Night

TBA Opening Night Thursday, September 6 at 8:00 PM

To kickoff the 16th TBA Festival, step into the thriving Pacific Northwest street-and-club dance community and experience a 7-to-smoke freestyle dance battle, The Beautiful Street, where dancers will compete, round for round, in the styles of breakdance, hip-hop, house, locking, popping, vogue, waacking, and more. Celebrating individuality, creativity, and technique, freestyle dancers are fueled by the music, each other, and the crowd. This battle will engage and inspire. The dance battle will be followed by an epic dance party!…

ANTHEM

Next Event:
Friday, September 7 at 6:30 PM

Questioning contemporary dance’s predisposition towards neutrality, authenticity, and the desexualization of the female body, ANTHEM embraces theatricality, virtuosity, and sass. The work weaves together vernacular dance styles to explore labor, play, and feminine posturing. Four women execute a repetitive, complex set of movements that evolves, as each rotates hypnotically within the confines of a square. Over time, the meditative rigor of their steps dissolves into a tangle of commotion, blurring the distinction between the mundane and the glamorous.

Some Styles of Masculinity

Next Event:
Pt. 1 Rock Star: Friday, September 7 at 6:30 PM

In this three-part performance-lecture series, titled Some Styles of Masculinity (2017) and presented as part of the exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Gregg Bordowitz explores tropes of masculinity that have been formative to his own coming-of-age. Each evening, Bordowitz considers a different seminal figure: the rock star, the rabbi, or the comedian. Key Yiddish words for all three are farbissener, rakhmones, and schpilkes. Some Styles of Masculinity extends Bordowitz’s understanding of gender as “bound up, entangled, with ethnic, religious, and national identities as well as sexuality, race, and class.”…

JACK &

Next Event:
Friday, September 7 at 8:30 PM

JACK & is a stand-up routine turned sitcom baking fiasco that mingles cakes and kitchen disasters, recipes and remedies, jokes, and goldfish to paint the portrait of a dream interrupted and resumed. The comedy of errors is structured on social codes and training from prison reentry programs to debutante balls. The performance considers re-entry to society after prison, focusing not the time one has served but the measure of one’s dreaming that is given to the state….

Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)

Next Event:
Saturday, September 8 at 7:00 PM

Combining a Dr. Strangelove-inspired performance with a daring forum for public conversation, Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) explores aging, anxiety, hidden desires, and how to look forward when the future is uncertain. Adopting the characters of a bombastic general and an ineffectual president, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of the performance troupe Split Britches lace this interactive piece with playful urgency and lethargy, to encourage discussion about the political landscape. In the “Situation Room,” twelve audience members are invited to become a Council of Elders to discuss the global issues of the day, as the company weaves in satirical insights and humour. The two pioneering theatre-makers see undisturbed ordinances as a metaphor for the disregarded potential in elders, and hope to uncover buried resources in us all.

Soft Goods

Next Event:
Saturday, September 8 at 8:30 PM

PACIFIC NORTHWEST PREMIERE Equally funny and heartbreaking, Soft Goods lays bare the beauty and brutality of backstage culture. Performed by an ensemble of stage technicians and dancers, and structured as a live load-in and technical rehearsal for a performance that never happens, the show illuminates the lonesomeness of theaters, the spectral elegance of a lighting focus, the choreography of labor, and the labor of dance. Soft Goods is a meditation on work, life, loss, and occupational self-obliteration….

NXT LVL is back at PICA bringing another epic party for social justice back to Portland. In January, they brought some of the West Coast’s most exciting musicians for an all night dance party to raise money and bring awareness. They’ll be bringing that same energy and same mission to TBA—their surprise line-up will be one you won’t want to miss. …

PUSHIT! [exercise 1 in getting well soon]

Next Event:
In Piedmont along N. Williams Ave.: Sunday, September 9 at 2:30 PM

US WEST COAST PREMIERE: Can resistance be choreographed? Pushit!, a site-responsive performance by NIC Kay, is a meditation on emotional labor and the impossibility of the stage as a place of freedom for the Black performer. This work is part of a larger set of exercises in getting-well-soon. …

Taught by S1 Synth Library

Sunday, September 9 at 4:00 PM

Portland artist-run space and TBA late-night artists/curators S1 will facilitate a workshop on sound collage and layering with multiple DJ set-ups, taught by members of the internationally recognized S1 Synth Library. Explore basic concepts of using CDJS and how to create soundscapes and unexpected layers and rhythms from field recordings, samples, and more. No expertise or experience necessary….

Vinyl Equations

Next Event:
Monday, September 10 at 6:30 PM

Syd Barrett and Nina Simone. Curtis Mayfield and Richard Nixon. These are some of the radically differing voices juxtaposed within Vinyl Equations, a performance that presents a series of vinyl records in unusual combinations to generate the beginnings of an alternative, non-linear, non-genre based history of recorded music, in strictly analogue terms. Accompanied by a single record turntable, artist and writer Robin Deacon will share a collection of stories, lectures and possible dance routines that aim to uncover strange echoes and oblique similarities between the records he has chosen for analysis. From describing his childhood fear of Joy Division album covers, to the contemporary search for an obscure record of Caribbean folk songs featuring the voice of his mother, Vinyl Equations shifts between the realms of direct autobiographical account and fictional speculation in an approach that has come to characterize Robin Deacon’s work….

Self Karaoke

Next Event:
Monday, September 10 at 8:30 PM

WORLD PREMIERE: Weird Allen Kaprow (WAK) presents self-karaoke, a new body of video, installation, and performance work that repurposes pop melodies to explore the political dimensions of self-care in our crumbling late capitalist democracy. Self-Karaoke features new songs and performances by special guest collaborators. …

FIN DE CINEMA: COCTEAU'S BEAUTY AND THE BEAST

Monday, September 10 at 10:00 PM

FIN DE CINEMA is a recurring live film score series curated by Gina Altamura of Portland music venue and nightclub, Holocene. This series, established in 2009, allows local pop and experimental musicians to reinterpret the soundtracks to classic art films. FIN DE CINEMA returns to TBA for the second year in a row, with a reprise performance of their reimagined score to Cocteau’s Beauty and The Beast (originally performed at Holocene in January of 2018). This year’s show will be composed and performed by Like A Villain, Patricia Wolf, John Niekrasz, Jonathan Sielaff, Amenta Abioto, and Noah Bernstein.

AN INFECTED SUNSET

Tuesday, September 11 at 10:00 PM

AN INFECTED SUNSET is an ekphrastic long-form prose poem first conceived in August, 2016, in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, police killings of unarmed Black men, and in the midst of the Standing Rock #NODAPL Resistance. During the writing of the poem, the settler colonial nation-state elected the 45th president of this colonized country, which revealed a sudden revival of extreme white supremacist nationalism. As the social landscape evolved, the Liberated Poem emerged as an offering to Indigenous communities and landscapes that strive for a decolonial and sovereign future, emancipated from white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal settler colonial trauma drama. This performance poem is a reflection on queer sex, survival and death politics, indigenous identity, settler and heteronormative romanticism, environmental injustice, and the importance of honoring community. …

Prince Romeo the Crow

Wednesday, September 12 at 10:00 PM

S.E.C.R.E.T.S. presents Prince Romeo the Crow, a theatrical performance of the eponymous album that explores the duality of love and fear, and the forces that shape our actions and fates. This theatrical performance is a surrealist multimedia take on the album. Part experimental theater, part live music video, the performance features dreamy, dark pop ballads, costumes and dramatic visuals. Interactions on this stage give visual and material interpretation of the overwhelming, contradictory forces that shape our feelings and actions—dealing in particular with issues of love, fear, courage, fate, and agency. Prince Romeo the Crow uses obfuscation and visual dispersal, to refocus attention from the performers themselves to their ideas, resulting in a more intimate, introspective experience. This performance asks the following. At what point does the performance of love and fear become love and fear itself? In performing, do we conjure those actual forces, as we conjure them bodily on the stage? And if so, when faced with them, what do we do?

POETRY READING

Collection of Lovers

Next Event:
Thursday, September 13 at 6:30 PM

US WEST COAST PREMIERE: In Collection of Lovers, Raquel André envisions a particular collection—one made up of lovers. Between Lisbon, Ponta Delgada, Rio de Janeiro, Loulé, Minde, Paredes de Coura, Sever do Vouga, Ovar, Manaus, Barreiro, Bergen, Stavanger, Oslo, and Warsaw, André has collected 161 lovers. People of all nationalities, genders and ages, agree to meet her in an unfamiliar apartment, to build a fictional intimacy within the span of an hour. Throughout each city she travels, she encounters more lovers and the collection grows. These encounters are documented by photograph, to serve as content for an ever-evolving performance—to be further mediated in books, theater, T.V., and other formats. Collection of Lovers serves as a seemingly infinite archive, to show what a collection of relationships might mean. Throughout this peculiar body of work, André falls into a new abyss each time the door opens to a new lover, and fiction and reality become irresistibly entwined….

Contralto

Next Event:
Thursday, September 13 at 7:30 PM

US WEST COAST PREMIERE: Contralto is an hourlong work for video, strings, and percussion. The piece features aspects of experimental music and documentary, with a cast of transgender women that speak, sing, and perform vocal exercises, accompanied by a dense and varied musical score that includes various conventional and “non-musical” approaches to sound-making….

ALBUM

Next Event:
Thursday, September 13 at 8:30 PM

US WEST COAST PREMIERE ALBUM is an evening-length solo performance that researches my herstory from a tableaux of personal narratives, a product of approaches that compound ethnography, memoir, and choreography. Uniting text, song, and dance inside of the content of an album― a picture album, a song album, an autobiographical album, a herstorical album― the work finds ways to be an archive, or altar, for my body. My relationship to urbanity, vampires, love, and marginality arise with equal importance, as I orbit around the primary curiosity: I’m not sure who will write a herstory about me, so I’m starting now so that they can have good notes. In ALBUM, I make visible the surround, a chorus of influences that have shaped who I am.

Pelléas & Mélisande: a Vaudeville Symbolist Duodrama

Next Event:
Friday, September 14 at 3:00 PM

Loosely based on the original turn-of-the-century play by Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande is about love, silence, and the ineffable nature of human emotion. It bears the fluctuating trait of tragicomedy (funny/sad), and involves timekeeping, constant weeping, and the symbolism that epitomized the original play. As Pelléas et Mélisande engages a mystery it does not understand, the writers hope their audience might slip into this mystery, to find a new and surprising way to commune.

La Nuit, La Traversée, Sur le fil

Next Event:
Friday, September 14 at 6:30 PM

US PREMIERE With spare aesthetics and focused intensity, choreographer Nacera Belaza invites the audience into an immersive experience through her vision and artistic process. Compagnie Nacera Belaza takes us on a journey through a trio of introspective, meditative and transcendent dance works, (whose titles translate as as The Night, The Crossing, and The Wire), revealing the evolution of her work as one would experience viewing three different paintings by a single artist in a gallery. Belaza’s hope is for each piece to become something new in the audience’s imagination, that one’s gaze is sharpened when let in on the inner workings of the artist’s mind.

Awaiting Oblivion—Temporary Solutions for surviving the dystopian future we find ourselves within at present

Next Event:
Friday, September 14 at 6:30 PM

Blurring the lines between fiction and reality, Awaiting Oblivion… follows the story of AO, an anonymous street artist who has tasked artists Tim Smith Stewart and Jeffrey Azevedo to create a performance that will share AO’s “temporary solutions” for existing within our collapsing empire. Inspired by creative processes developed by the ’60’s Fluxus art movement, each “temporary solution” is a poem contained in a Flux-kit (a cigar box collaged with stenciled imagery and typewritten letters). We follow Tim, Jeffrey, and AO in a radical flurry of street art, secret messages, and performance scores in a poetic fight for survival….

SANITY TV

Next Event:
Friday, September 14 at 6:30 PM

US WEST COAST PREMIERE:Sanity TV investigates the flexible boundaries of identity and psyche through a fictional talk show wherein there is no distinction between sanity or insanity. The interviews begin routinely, then slowly unravel toward something unrecognizable. The “guest” ultimately surrenders a position of authority, even if that authority is beyond their own ideas of self, if only for the duration of the interview.

AFTER

Next Event:
Friday, September 14 at 8:30 PM

US WEST COAST PREMIERE Andrew Schneider and his team follow up their revolutionary, OBIE award-winning tech-theater masterpiece YOUARENOWHERE, with a mind-bending examination of what constitutes a single life, and the endless possible outcomes at the precise moment of death.

Dykes Wanted

Friday, September 14 at 10:00 PM

JUDY is a queer, femme, and non-binary-centered party that materializes every last Saturday night of the month at a dive bar in Portland, Oregon. Run by queer women and exclusively featuring female identified, trans, and non-binary DJs, JUDY was started in 2014. Each month, JUDY features hand-drawn flyers of community members, party people, and over-the-top queens, with the ritual of crowning a new “Judy” at every party….

Stories about Food, Family, Identity

Saturday, September 15 at 5:00 PM

Tender Table is a series of stories about food, family, and identity told by femmes of color and nonbinary people of color. For each event, storytellers prepare a dish connected to the experiences they’ve shared. Audiences are invited to listen generously, spend time communally, and sample the food….

One of the brightest voices on the Portland hip-hop scene is Alana Chenevert, aka The Last Artful, Dodgr. Her name is a nod to her hometown of Los Angeles, a pun on its baseball team, a reference to Oliver Twist, and it illustrates a life spent dodging bullets. Since arriving in Portland in 2013, she’s made the city her own and has quickly become a rising star. Press and fans have compared her to Chance the Rapper, Missy Elliott, and Dizzee Rascal with lyrics inspired by Sufjan Stevens. While we’re always sad to see the festival end, brilliant hip-hop delivered by a queer black woman is the perfect way to say ‘until next year.’…

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